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14ymedio
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14ymedio is the first independent digital media outlet in Cuba. It was founded on May 21,2014, by the Cuban blogger and activist Yoani Sánchez, the project started with a group of 12 reporters, whose objective was to produce a digital media outlet with different types of news. The newspaper contains news about Cuba and the world, in related to national politics, international politics, economy, culture, society, science and technology. It also publishes editorials, opinion articles, and interviews, the name ‘14ymedio’ characterizes the project in several ways. First, the number 14 is because the newspaper was born on the fourteenth floor, 14ymedio is born in digital format in one of the countries with the lowest internet connectivity across the globe. The team uploads the information by using Wifi access from hotels, 14ymedio starts as personal project of its founder, Yoani Sánchez, the founder Generación Y, a blog that now has about a thousand published texts and more than a million comments. Its main objective is to inform, to space for debate, to respect those who think differently. For its initial funding, the newspaper received approximately $150.000 in private investment, the first edition of 14ymedio was focused on a wide variety of topics, including politics, culture and society. It offered a critique to the Cuban healthcare system and questioned the status of baseball as the national sport, three hours after 14ymedio published its first edition on the internet, the site was hacked. Internet technicians later on tested it was ETECSA, the monopoly of the Cuban government. From places outside Cuba, users can access the site without any restriction, recognizing that restricting access to the site was an initiative of the Cuban government, Yoani Sánchez published in her Twitter account, “Wrong strategy from the Cuban government. There is nothing more attractive than the forbidden, the actions of the Cuban government against 14ymedio have provoked various reactions in the international arena. The Inter American Press Association blamed the Cuban government for restricting the access to the site and they claimed that the governments actions show that Cuban rulers still believe that freedom of expression is a grant and not a human right. Roberta Jacobson, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, despite these actions against the newspaper, 14ymedio has not stopped publishing daily since the day of its release. The site showed consistency in its publications and growth in terms the amount of people it reached, by May 2014, 14ymedio had reached 6,000 followers on Facebook and 11,500 on Twitter. 14ymedio has also been recognized by a variety of leading international newspapers. Al-Jazeera highlighted that 14ymedio is the first independent media outlet in Cuba in 50 years to test the Castro regimes tolerance for dissent, currently, 14ymedio publishes more than a dozen of articles per day. Similarly, it seeks to inform those living outside Cuba about the situation in the island, the articles that were published by 14ymedio were quoted in major newspapers and media outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, El País, and others